


Birdsongs

by Arctic_Cyclist



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Art, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Mountaineering, Running
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-05-12 19:27:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19235599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arctic_Cyclist/pseuds/Arctic_Cyclist
Summary: Talia knows she's not a good mother. One of the worst. But she did try to give him the tools he needed to thrive. She tried to give him the wings to fly with, even as it means he'll leave her behind.





	1. Tern

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, I get really annoyed by all the people who are like "Children want to play. Children don't want to train constantly or climb mountains. Talia was so abusive for making Damian do that." And I resist the urge to say, "You don't get out much, do you? You have never watched the Olympics, have you?" Possibly this is because I've met climbers and Olympians, and more importantly, their children. Four year olds have attempted to school me on the use of a compass, knots, how to read rocks, snow, snow loads, and other climbing things. 
> 
> So it's an interesting idea to consider Damian, Talia, and Ra's in the context of real life. Especially Ra's. Central Asian history is fascinating, and the fact that there are several cultures that match the time frame of his people's extinction that had trade empires between North Africa and China who were fair haired and either blue or green eyed makes my inner geek squeal with joy. Alas, they aren't as well researched as they should be, and there has been a 1200 year effort to completely erase them from history. Which is...also interesting. The 700s man, what a century to learn about. Not to live in, as they were interesting times.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twenty four hours as measured by mortals is shorter than twenty four hours measured by Ra's.
> 
> Either way, it is time enough to contemplate relationships.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a conversation with someone recently about the mental state you get into when doing monotonous physical labor or extreme physical activity. One of those things that everyone finds themselves dwelling on is failed or relationships, and to quote the person, "It's weird to realize ten years later that you were the bad one in the relationship. There were so many areas where I could have changed just a few things, changed my reactions, and maybe we wouldn't be together today, but we wouldn't have ended as badly as we did."
> 
> So that's part of where this comes from. It's also interesting to realize that Damian's secret jail in Teen Titans is not a cry for attention from Bruce, as Damian has figured out that relationship is...yeah. The jail is about Talia, good and bad, and his efforts to prove his worth to her and maybe rein her in.
> 
> Then there's Talia's remembering Damian, and fearing for his safety when she knew nothing besides survival, an incredibly powerful moment. It deserves to be explored, as does the many positive parts of Damian and Talia's childhoods. They had near identical childhoods, but for all the bad, there was good. It's how abusive relationships are: twisty and complicated.

She dreams of solstice. Of the running. Hours of it. Past pain. Past hope and fear and frustration. Beyond exhaustion. The flat never ending light, sun circling the sky. The mud and mosquitos that she breathes in, the infrequent breaks to urinate and shit, which disappear as the run continues. Always continuing until there is nothing left, no name, no past or future, just the rasp of air over her tongue and throat to her lungs that tastes of blood and salt sweet sweat, the ache of muscles pushed into pure endurance. 

It's a ritual that has a meaning when it starts, lost as the hours pass. 

There are people who do this for fun. Who do this not because it is required and expected of them by their family, but because they like to run. People testing the limits of their endurance and exhaustion.

Humans who seek the edge, curving around towards courage in ways different from those of whom are considered heroes. They think of bicycle rides in the deep cold, along arctic trails and the old roads, alone, out beyond the thin red threads of rescue, as things that should be done because they can be done. Men and women who laugh off the fear, devouring isolation, blisters, shin splints, broken bones, bug bites, dehydration and hunger, focusing instead on the purity of their action in motion. Souls who seek that silver edged high that comes from crossing over into the far edge of humanity's strengths, from finding ones center in silence and the wind, the distant calls of birds.

Some people she has met will gather up friends, a whim made at the other pole of the year when daylight is short and a dim blue, then strike out to do the sixty mile non stop hikes, or the endless runs where distance is determined by strength, speed, and stamina in that time when a single day will last for months and night is a memory. Often they take their children and teenagers with them once they're strong enough to seek the distance, the toddlers still light enough to carry over the cotton grasses and sedges.

Talia wants to call them insane, but they aren't. Not by any standard she knows. Besides, in the years she was semi-free, she signed up to do solstice runs. Talia flew north, flew south, a tern chasing the sun, to run. It was odd, different from with her father's people. There were men and women who came out to cheer and clap throughout the long hours. People with fresh cookies, energy drinks, juice that they brought for strangers as well as kith and kin, proud to offer support for something they don't believe they can do. The ending was set, occurring long before she collapsed, sobbing with her weakness and the pressure of Father's glare. 

Twenty four hours as measured by mortals is shorter than twenty four hours measured by Ra's.

As measured by mortals, twenty four hours breaks free of fear and shame to fill with pride and honor. Instead of lonely silences and snarled insults, there is the support of others, people who want her success alongside their own. They want to talk. To know her by her own edges and boundaries. Conversations abound in measured breathes about the universality of humans, how by doing this they continue a tradition tied to Sun Dances and Bull Fighting, rituals of testing human limits found in all cultures, all over the world. She partakes in discussions on shamanism, totems, animism, the true human religions that tie a person irreconcilably to a place, joining them to the land. Or else talks about shoes and blisters. Bras. Chafing, in all places, particularly the awkward ones. Gold Bond Powder in butt cracks and everywhere else comes up each run. It amazes her that people could forget to pack it, that she has forgotten to pack that holy source of discomfort minimizer. 

Among the other mothers there's the taboo chatter: how one never gets their body back, the other darker sides of pregnancy such as meshes, stitches, pain killers, fistulas, being left alone as others celebrate, something she knows albeit from the beginning not the end. Part of her wishes she'd carried Damian herself, a side is silenced by the part of her that appreciates her ability to sneeze without bladder leakage. 

Her fellow runners aren't friends, but they are people who are happy to see her each time, and she them. Folks who are delighted to share coffee, teas, beers with her before and after their trials. They chat with her as they all stretch and limber up: gossiping over fellows and pets, the famous and infamous people she knows or might know. Among the women, she feels like a woman herself, listens with anticipation and dread as they discuss menopause, the before, after, and during with all the frankness of people whose value is not set by their reproductive abilities and egg viability. Afterwards, they invite her, and she accepts, to their houses for cheap wine, more chatter, sleep, and showers with cranky water heaters and limited water. There will be pasta and veg, local meats, baked goods, gluten free goods. A section of life that she, a billionaire on a bad day and more on an average day, is a stranger of sorts to. It's not as strange of a life to her it would be to the men and women she has loved, fucked, helped create, or worked with; these are her father's people as well. Even if they don't work for or with him, they share a kinship as untamable souls who crave the wilderness like al Ghuls in order to be whole, borderline stable, sane.

It's...fun. 

The t-shirts are saved for her son. Each one is ordered in a standard cut small and medium. Men's sizing, a touch tight, a touch loose on her. Too big for the child, who once they fit will outgrow them in a matter of weeks. Damian will outgrow her gifts while she's distracted by her father, by Luthor, by her creations and inheritances, by the consequences of her actions and schemes, by the parts of her that are fracturing, broken, things that she doesn't have the skills to fix. 

Even knowing this, she keeps the stained shirts that reek of her despite being worn once and washed a half dozen times before presentation. Depending on his training, on her father's behavior and words, on why she's come back and her reactions to her father, he'll sneer at the pitiful gift, accept it stone faced, or there will be a bright curl of a smile that lights up the world and questions about her run along with stories of his own twice a year endless thudding through slush and mud, over trails with roots worn shiny by feet.

Damian doesn't take the pitiful offerings with him to Gotham when he abandons her. During his return to the island while believing her dead and rescuing his imperfect selves, she noted that he gathered up the various shirts printed with sponsors and takes them to his father's house. Turned inside out, they are sown into colorful pillows with restless tendencies, prone to wandering from room to room, chair to couch, to towers and safe houses each time the panic sets it and Damian runs as his nomad blood demands. Her little bat loses a few of them; no one will ever speak of the two Bruce has stolen. There was a brief announcement about the one Jason plucks up and walks away with. Bold as the day she met him, Jason looks Damian in the eye when he takes the crimson one, declaring that he has a claim on Talia as family too, however screwed up it is. She's big sister, the aunt, he deserved Jason informs Damian. The boy acquiesces to the claiming with a shrug.

He's acquired her gift of carving off parts of herself, of accepting that sacrifices happen, that there are others who matter more, at least to fathers. Maybe Damian knows the other half of what the pillow theft is: by claiming a right to Damian's mother as family Jason has claimed the boy as well despite their history. An only child would say Jason claimed Damian despite the blood and violence between them, people with siblings would say that violence is what creates a claim. Blood spilled by blood, this is something Talia understands: the kills that matter most are done by and to the ones who love you. Blood is the greatest of offerings, like her son, she too had a Year.

Before he defeated her, Damian used to ask, as good as begging in their family, to come with her. Each half year, he'd send her a formal letter. Sealed with wax, inside was the registration fee and a letter in his impeccable penmanship outlining why she should take him with her. Outside the League, Damian is too young to run more than a basic marathon, an excuse she used for denying him. When it came to climbs, she would say yes as long as Ra's demands weren't onerous. Damian wasn't too young to climb. They were never too young to climb. Climbers don't believe in too young to climb. 

If the mountains call, one must answer. 

Her father's choice to summit the sacred peak with her on his back just hours old is lauded, although most mountaineers simply let their newborns touch boulders, feel the stone beneath tender fingers. A promise, a taste. 

On his day of birth, she gave Damian blood and water. It was three days before she presented her child to the brilliant heights, four before she took him down into the darkness that extinguished her lanterns and rushed in to settle upon them. The deep cavern's dark was more comforting, more crowded than the harsh alpine light. There were bats who sang to them, things that dwell in the dark places who swam up to brush them. Birds greeted them on both the descents and ascents back to the hemispheres of easy living, as birds will. She gave him a craving for the void in his infancy, and still marvels at it.

Before he was one, Damian was willfully scaling rock walls when she was socializing him. She'd or her father would take him to a gym run by outsiders, civilians, and the infant would escape for the wall, then find his line to the top. He'd look back and laugh, new teeth erupting, and people would treat it as normal, adorable. He's not the first natural born mountaineer, he won't be the last. There were others with the same drive, that Olympian need that knows no rest, no urge to play. One of the girls they met on these excursions beat him to summiting El Capitan on a free route, another beat him to summiting the twelve highest peaks of South America. Restless things, they all will shatter hearts, claimed as they have been before puberty by the heights, by the abyss, by the void in all its joy and love.

Through these and other trips she relearns as Damian learns for the first time the etiquette of mountains, including never name a child for a mountain. It's a climber adage, for they may not be cowardly, but they are a different sort of superstitious. One has to be at those altitudes, the same as divers in the depths. When stepping from the safe, easy places, from gentle lands ideal for humans into the places that resist them, there must be a wary respect. A mountain may not notice a climber on its flanks, at its summit, but it will notice if you promise it your child as a tribute. A child named for a mountain will feel the mountain's call. They will die on its slopes. Nothing, not the Pits or other magic can bring them back.

Members of assorted expeditions outside parks share this with Damian in places he and the other climber children romped up and down the walls, practiced knots, and examined stones. Liminal spaces where the adventurers showered, rested, gathered and spun tales over red wines and marijuana, including Talia and Ra's. Their fellows were like her: sunburned in strips along sunglasses' lines, wrists, knees between the rolled up pants and boots, streaked with sweat and ripe with clean, wholesome activities. Damian would perch on her lap, one of her arms around his waist and her chin resting in his unruly downy hair, eating handfuls of gorp and gulping beverage mix that was a chemical imagining of fruit, and listened to her and others tell stories edited to less than true. Talia sipped wine from paper cups, let him feed her the nuts he didn't like. Nipped at his fingers to make him giggle. He was soft and rounded then, comforting to clutch, not yet as hard, swift, and sharp as his mind had already become, although his agility and grace had begun to develop. That came from her, that grace, that agility to rival Grayson's, along with the curve of his mouth, a gentling of his chin, a slant of his cheekbones. Things that she knows Bruce sees each time he looks at her child, things that unlike those blue eyes Damian was born with now turned green by failures, can't be altered to prove that Bruce has the stronger claim to her child.

Her son will be like her: exotic wherever he goes as an adult. Indefinable. Eurasian, and that thought makes her laugh, because humans have short memories and the Arabs and T'ang Dynasty were very effective at the eraser of her grandmother's ancient races. People have forgotten the bright haired, pale eyed children of the steeps that would become Mongol lands. They think of the Huns, not as the fair devils they were with hair of blood and fire, but as black haired and eyed. Thousands of years of olive skinned auburn and blond peoples tamed horses and wandered between the forests of Europe and China, restless, swift, born to a legacy of endless endurance wiped away like the daily special board at a cafe. Six thousand years are easy to erase when the one who decided upon the forgetting lives beyond generations.

Her father is most effective at the slaughter: people, languages, gods, cultures, memories, hope, dreams; all starting with his own. Landscapes he leaves to others. Childhoods? He's unpredictable with those, destroying and sparing in a pattern she can't decipher. 

Even when they walk among their other tribe, the people of all colors and nations who need nor want any violence besides what the mountains and trails may offer, when al Ghuls become generations of adventurers instead of assassins and architects of history, she can't decipher her father's attitudes towards childhood. A man who has lived like him, does he even know his ideas and beliefs anymore?

Just as important, will Damian still love the mountains as he grows? Will he think of those other children, the civilians with no blood on their hands, and the way they'd clip in and climb with their mothers and fathers like he did with her and Ra's? Granite and schist, raw marble and gneiss, all the legacies of rocks under their fingers, her hoisting him up to start the climb, trusting him to set her lines, has he discarded that for his father's conditional love? Has he, like Richard, sullied the focus of the movement as pure and holy as the dance of blades that defines Demons, in order to have the Detective's fickle affection, the love that has more rules and boundaries than even her own, her father's and grandfather's? Will Damian lose the capacity for forgiveness that marks their bloodline as he forgets how to listen to the void, to the sound of the world breathing?

She thinks of him when she runs or climbs, her son. Not that she has time for that anymore, those hours of solitude with her thoughts and self. Hours to strive for her own edge, her own wholeness and sanity. Yet in those precious rare moments when she's not trapped by previous actions, she can run. Talia can think about her son and her father, all the mistakes she keeps making. Often she'll consider the one she once called Beloved and has no title for now. As the hours wear by, the miles tick by in loops of ten, miles instead of kilometers as sometimes she craves human inaccuracies, parts of her slip away starting with the Detective. Then her father, Honor, the rest of herself. All that is left is her son.

When she runs far enough, she becomes a restless bird with the wide ranging wings, a swan, an arctic tern forever seeking the son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't do it this year, but this is a self insert of sorts as I have been one of those people who goes out to the 24 hour marathons to cheer and offer fresh goods, and provide wine for the post run socials. All the physical things Talia mulls over is based on actual people. The adage about never naming a child for a mountain is real and it's based on Nada Devi Unsoeld. Two fun facts pertaining to her final climb: first, a thirteen year old was part of the expedition and summited the mountain, becoming one of the few people in history to do so, and secondly Nanda Devi is frequently portrayed as Ra's al Ghul's favorite home bases.
> 
> For more thoughts on women climbing, I can't recommend this article enough:  
> https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-women-mountaineers/
> 
> And yes, the Huns are documented by contemporaries as being light haired and light eyed, and some of the Han although there is no conclusive evidence yet published to show that they were the same ethnic group. It kind of blew my mind too to realize that there were what modern people would consider white who were native to Japan and the steeps of Asia for 6000 plus years before they were actively exterminated in genocides by 1000 AD. So it isn't really white washing with Ra's and Talia if you put Ra's as born before the first crusade, he was in canon. It is also probable for him to have a Chinese father if he was born prior to the 700s, as Birth of the Demon and Batman & Robin 23.3 show he was.


	2. Tiercel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Value had been ascribed to Damian's boredom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember Snyder's Batman #20? How Clayface called out Bruce for being a bad dad and ignoring Damian right after Robin's death was livestreamed?
> 
> That's part of where this comes from. Detective Comics #14 (2013) when Bruce and Damian are discussing Damian's not attending a party that Cobblepot usurped despite being on the invitation is more of the inspiration for it.
> 
> Man, I don't know about you, but I miss how Bruce and Damian would hang out together and Bruce would try to tell Damian how to human in all the Batbooks. Good times.

As a demon, it is his right to eat souls. Carve off little pieces and savor them, discard the wrappings.

That is what Damian tells himself at the start. Not that this activity is a way to tolerate the inherent boredom of galas, fundraisers, and other social events where people pinch his cheeks and ruffle his hair then ask where his more important family members are. Even at the events with kids who are physically similar in age to him, there is the overwhelming monotony, a casual murdering of time as people network and he's there because "You need socializing, Master Damian," and "We all have had to do it, Little D. It's part of being Robin." 

It starts with a golf pencil, a program, and a glimpse of one of the waitstaff leaning behind a pillar with a shoe off to rub her arch as she shares a snide grin with her fellows, judging and joking about the expensive guests she serves. He grabs at the reality of the mousey haired women's moment and sucks it down into himself before expelling it, her, around the inanity of a choice between fish or chicken in an over-salted mushroom sauce. Then, in a moment of regret for what he has done, he discards the bent edged paper where she will find it when she clears the table.

From there, it becomes a habit. Skulking through events, sliding past those who would and would not notice him, he selects victims and steals away parts of their souls using things like the ballpoint pens he dismantles and slits into pieces to provide the right texture to the moment, drinks set down that he slips away smirking, crushed petals and greenery form the centerpieces, scraps of food, swishes of juice and colas.

Circling, he hunts for the real among the carefully constructed. Real like the old couple who are merging together after fifty years with hands resting together in a comfortable afterthought of habit: her dress in sloe gin, his suit in broken pen, their skin a wash of peach crushed and color extracted by vodka, hair wisps of negative space framed in whisky. A father making faces at his son to make the child giggle behind their mother and grandfather's backs is done in red and rosé wine outlines. A woman with coffee hair and a chartreuse gown like Mother would wear, which gives him extra pleasure as chartreuse always does: despite his efforts, Ra's al Ghul has never had anyone over the centuries spill the secrets of crafting the liquor. 

"Some monks, it seems," Ra's would say with the laugh and expression reserved for when Damian or someone did something beyond what Ra's thought them capable of, "are beyond corruption and seduction." 

Knowing that makes the liquor one of Damian's favorites to work with beyond the color he has sworn to view as displeasing: like these swift sketches and the complex paintings that were a core part of what Talia made him love, he is trying to discard the feel of that shade of green with everything else of him that doesn't match up to what Drake says is Robin.

Still. Still, he can't help the way the color relaxes his spine despite himself, the same way he misses the heft of a perfect blade, Goliath stretching his wings, Mother scratching his back when he couldn't sleep and reading to him in languages he hasn't had a chance to learn, Grandfather's rare laughter ringing out as his eyes crinkle.

Those moments, those things, are pieces of his own soul and not meant for devouring as much as he wants to. These are not to be disgorged onto paper the way he does the moments he captures in boredom even as his fingers burn and itch to do so.

Instead he paints a dancer in absinthe, gin, and walnut liquor as she smacks the back of her son's head with a smile, the sharp clean edges of the herbs reminding him of sunshine and sparring. He captures a service dog leaning up against its person to stop the panic attack before it begins, its tongue lolling at pride in a job well done using chrysanthemum petals, fur a far cry from Goliath's, but the same animal pride in its eyes. Over and over as the weeks wear on and people enter and leave his life, as he keeps trying and failing to learn the rules of his father's world, prove that he has as much worth as all the strays and harlots his father prefers to keep company with, he hunts out scraps of souls to keep from starving.

It doesn't take long despite his well known surly nature before Damian starts accumulating invitations to events. Every engraved card has his name embossed on it requesting the pleasure of his company, even in cases where Father, Grayson, Drake or all three are not on the card, or to events no ten year old should be invited to. When Pennyworth does the RSVPs, he frowns and looks askance at Damian as the host says, "Oh, but we would really love it if at least the youngest Mister Wayne could come."

Because he knows all the codes, hers, Grandfather's, Father's, and Oracle's, he can find where all mentions of Damian Wayne on any device or system one of Batman's allies and associates would see or use has been blocked, even on the ludicrously basic sites like Facebook and Instagram. Mother and Grandfather have not broken their decade old habit of keeping Damian out of Batman's eyes even as hashtags referring to Damian rise in popularity.

He'd felt the eyes, caught that people were watching him hunt. Damian hadn't expected that those little scraps, those discarded remains of moments stolen had become treasures. Without realizing it, he'd started a game in Gotham. A hunt where he had helped create the rules, created a value for himself although not in the way or with the people he'd expected.

The first rule was that Damian had to be at the event. Documented, caught like a wild animal on a phone's camera as it slunk through a hole in the fence. Second, the subject had to be caught on camera as well, the greatest of value in this hunt being if one could catch Damian stealing away his victim's essence with the victim, or as the hunters called it "documenting and verification of the artist and his subjects." Then the greatest prize of all, the scrap that held the remains of The Demon Wayne's meal found and claimed, even better if it was signed by the persons he'd fed upon. There are threads full of discussions on him, and how to find and capture the youngest Wayne creating art out of discards and moments.

Prices and insurance values have been set on his boredom.

Knowing this is odd. It is like Grandfather's smile when he talks of times before, of favorite hounds and horses, or those rare souls throughout the millennia of his life who managed to surprise and delight Ra's causing his bitter old heart to brim with hope and joy. It makes Damian dance up on his toes, stretch out where his wings would be if he was one of those demons who'd fallen from a previous place and role, burn bright like a tiercel taken from the mews eager for the pursuit. It puts a new spin on his hunt. There's always more thrill in knowing that the hunter is also the hunted and evading the pursuit. 

He starts controlling his appearances; his art is between him and his victims. Damian doesn't want someone like Cobblepot to snatch up the scraps that Damian intended for staff, to profit from a Wayne without the Waynes getting a better deal. A park opening is good, store openings are where he's unexpected and not looked for are better, as are openings of family restaurants and park shelter birthdays. Last, but not even close to least, he sends his mother several of the scraps, the ones he has held heavy and aching in his chest throughout his tenure in his father's city, as a nod between enemies acknowledging each other's honor and courtesy.

Though she has sworn to kill him, and he doesn't doubt that she will as Talia is many things among them not someone that should ever be doubted or underestimated, she deserves his soul scraps. She knows what it means to keep parts of oneself away from family, solely for strangers who don't let assumptions about past and breeding determine how one should be judged and treated.

This is a demon thing. Survival no matter the conditions. Not a Robin or a Wayne or a Bat thing, regardless of what the chatter online may think. It belongs on the edges and in the margins, painted in absinthe and chartreuse, wine and gin, spilled jasmine tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: at any point in time, only three people in the world know the entire recipe and process for making chartreuse liquor.


End file.
